And that makes the Professor the Bill OReilly of boringheads who they invite on so they can flounce off because they don't want to hear anything that disturbs their worldview. Their stable of the same five commenters are expert flouncers. Just sayn'

Fine - I'll watch tonight after work - but, you should know, the only people not aware of the limits they'll go is liberals:

My liberal roommate threatened to call the cops on me because I disagreed with him about replacing all of our light bulbs.

And, now that I think about it, that's probably the biggest difference between me and my online hosts:

I'm now exposed and living what you guys only talk about, and suffering the consequences, and my anger about that makes me look unhinged. You, on the other hand, can look dumber than shit thinking your protected-from-it-all asses are going to open my eyes to it by talking to Droopy.

Because they're all lazy, conventional thinkers without a clue about anything outside of some shit they read about somewhere. And the fact there is this source of mass murder - that they maybe even support in some way - will completely escape them, drive them to think you're crazy, and issue denial after denial that anything of the kind is happening. But remember:

Crack you are living in a dream world. These douchenozzles never were on the A Train at three in the morning with some knuckleheads who you know are getting ready to rob you. Their knowledge of the violence and despair that is the real world is all theoretical to them.

The real world where you and I and a lot of the commenter’s who post here might as well be Narnia for all these yuppie scum hipster douchebags know. Give it up brother. It ain’t never gonna happen.

And, Althouse, thank you for repeatedly stating that the accusation of rape does not amount to a conviction. Nor does the fact that sex turns out badly mean that a woman is entitled to judicial satisfaction.

Got to give Crack props. I hadn't heard about the Ramtha murders. I hadn't even realized that Ramtha was still tuning in from Atlantis. Back in the 1980s, J.Z. Knight and Ramtha were the shizzle. Now, I guess, they're just the muzzle.

Althouse indicates that any new health care legislation would have avoided some of the current legal issues surrounding the so-called mandate because new legislation will need to include a constitution-based justification.

Watching Bob avoiding the charge of suppressing speech is just painful. No, he asserts, he's not calling for any speech to be suppressed. He just wants Glenn Beck shut up.

I have a number of liberal friends who believe, profoundly, in liberal ideas, and yet their practical politics is, like Bob's, profoundly illiberal. There's always a greater good that justifies the suppression of the individual.

I am SO happy you didn't have time to talk about Tiger Mother. And you did a good job of moderating Bob when he was crossing the line into hysteria--but I think you should have pursued him on how he would moderate speech without government coercion. He vaguely appealed to corporations self-censoring, but he obviously thinks that didn't work for Fox. Plus I think Fox's stockholders would file suit if Ailes or Murdoch decided to do what was in the interest of their consciences instead of the interest of their profits.

Ann, you need to go to a shooting range for an afternoon. That might help you be more forceful when talking about firearms!

Bob Wright should just give up on the political commentary because he has just become a ridiculous figure.

I think he should audition for the Wally Cox memorial center square in the New Hollywood Squares. That would be right up his alley.

Smile when you say that. Wally Cox was the locksmith on the original "Mission Impossible".

Crack you are living in a dream world. These douchenozzles never were on the A Train at three in the morning with some knuckleheads who you know are getting ready to rob you. Their knowledge of the violence and despair that is the real world is all theoretical to them.

Looks like Wright is getting frustrated that his Morality Police job is running out of his usual suspects. Obama acts like Bush, and no one cares. The Gays are getting what they want and no one cares. The atheists are dissing believers in a supernatural God , and no one cares. Blacks are no longer being discriminated against, only discriminated for, and no one cares. So its on to the shameful NFL running over college co-eds, and he can't even get Mrs Meade to care. Oh well, there is always Glen Beck's big fat mouth to censure in hopes we will care. Nope, we don't care. It's time to turn out the lights and go home, Bob.

I'm now exposed and living what you guys only talk about, and suffering the consequences, and my anger about that makes me look unhinged. You, on the other hand, can look dumber than shit thinking your protected-from-it-all asses are going to open my eyes to it by talking to Droopy.

I salute you Crack for being on the front lines of the battle! You know that you have our sincerest moral support!

The fact there is this source of mass murder - that they maybe even support in some way - will completely escape them, drive them to think you're crazy, and issue denial after denial that anything of the kind is happening.

Gotta disagree with those who dismiss BH and AA's participation in it. One, Ann is telegenic and presents herself well. I tend not to agree with most of what she's saying and from time to time do have a problem with her style, but my suspicion is that she is maybe one of the more popular participants on there. In fact, I think she should expand into tv and have said so before.

She has a good blog. While I think that, at the same time, I realize that more and more blogs are becoming insult machines. We just load in the verbiage and bam, fire away. I'm not sure how much true learning occurs. I try. I have learned, but after a while, I suppose, don't we have to ask what's the point?

Now I think something a little more sophisticated than [the argument that non-activity falls outside the scope of the commerce clause] ought to be taken into account. The way I look at the constitutional question has more to do with whether we're dealing with the kind of activity about which it needs to be possible to deal with it on a uniform national level...

Even supposing a need to regulate commercial health care at the national level, that doesn't turn non-activity into activity. You skip over this problem too casually.

When I was a kid I used to watch Wrestling on Channel 47. It was the precursor to the WWF and was run by Vince McMahon and his father.

Anyway they had this manager guy called the Grand Wizard of Wrestling. And he would come on and tell uncomfortable truths and yell and shout but nobody was buying what he was saying and all the audience would do is boo and his and call him names.

When I was a little girl... four or five years old... my dad would talk/joke about getting fired. I had nightmares for years about my dad getting fired because I didn't know what fired meant other than a fired gun or canon. It was distressing beyond reason and the nightmares were horrible.

The brains of very small children are very like the brains of liberals.

I think you guys are too hard on Bob Wright. There is no way he's as insufferable as some of the other people Althouse has talked to on there. In fact, he seems, in juxtaposition to certain others, rather likable (even if he is wrong.)

I've seen Beck's show a handful of times. With all the vitriol the left throws at him I'll just have to take it on faith, I guess, that sometimes he's fire breathing monster. I've never seen it, though.

Wow. I just watched the Glenn Beck "blow-up". It's fascinating to me watching liberals try to exercise their fascist urges while struggling to hide the same.

This guy plays with his shit every night on TV. He has virtually no sponsors left that will put their name on his program, outside some companies hawking gold and survival kits. Pointing out a car wreck doesn't mean you want to ban cars.

When Wright asked you if he should bring in a hate filled anti-semite to appear on bloggingheads, your response should have been, yes, if that's what you want to do. As you pointed out, his audience will decide if they want to keep coming back or not, just as Beck's audience will determine his ratings which will decide if he has a show in the future.

Wright has some dangerous ideas about limiting speech. You guys briefly chatted about Charles Manson on the Second Amendment segment. But weren't The Beatles an inspiration to Manson? I guess Wright's in favor of censoring musical lyrics. Cause you never know when a kook will hear them and act out. Wasn't John Hinkley, the man who tried to assassinate Ronald Reagan, inspired by the movie "Taxi Driver"? Better censor movies. Wasn't John Lenon's killer, Mark David Chapman, obsessed with "Catcher in the Rye"? Better censor books.

I don't think Michael Moore believes everything in his documentaries, but I also don't think he should be banned from producing them. I think Oliver Stone uses an awful lot of artistic license (i.e., borderline falsehoods) in his films about certain political figures who he doesn't much like. Does Wright want Michael Moore and Wright claims his problem with Beck is that Wright does not believe Beck's presentations are entirely truthful, so is Wright on the warpath to get Michael Moore and Oliver Stone banned from producing movies because they are not entirely truthful in their productions? Doubtful.

Glen Beck is the lone ranger in media land who takes the fact that Obama and Associates are doing everything in their power to wreck this country at home and abroad both now and for ever...and then doesn't say he thinks Obama means well, but says our current President is a skilled enemy weapon who only does what he intends to do. That is actually giving Obama much more respect than every other commenter does. So Beck has earned their Total Ridicule and Ostracism.

Original Mike said...I just want to point out that all of Farve's sleazy behavior happened after he left the greatest sports franchise of all time.

That's not true. It is just that people called him on it when he was out of the cacoon of Green Bay where he could do whatever he wanted. I bet he sent pictures of his dick to lots of babes while he was a Packer. He just didn't start it when he went to the Jets.

Plus the Jets are into feet so that is what they whack it too. Just sayn'

Is it telling that frequently he wasn't listening to you, but simply waiting for your finish so he could say what he wanted? That of course happened most when he had no counter, and especially when he didn't know the facts.

He isn't pointing Garage. He wants him off the air because he doesn't like what he has to say.

The excruciating part is watching Bob dodge the bigger issue. If he would just admit that he's willing to trade free speech for a kind of milquetoast conformism, he might get somewhere. Instead he keeps making excuses.

The first dodge is to go all first amendment. He isn't asking the government to shut down Glenn Beck, so what's the big deal. But no, that's not the point. Free speech is an ideal. The first amendment is just an instantiation of the ideal. If you really believe in free speech, you don't look for legalistic cover.

Well, I thought it was too civil. Althouse vs. Goldberg (Michelle, not Jonah), now that was entertainment.

I don't know why Robert Wright isn't funny when he's with Althouse. When he's with Mickey Kaus, his sense of humor really comes through. And there was one segment with some British guy (a very funny British guy) which was a comic classic.

I actually have no problem with the notion that it's *okay* for citizens to make choices that amount to a sort of censorship. We can't avoid choices or making them so some idea or expression is promoted and some other is shunted aside. Bob is right about that not being "censorship".

But his essential argument that Beck, ratings-getter or not, should be fired and prevented from having that exposure by his employer, rests on the notion that people are gullible and stupid and that if they are allowed to hear wrong ideas very bad things will happen.

It really doesn't sound that different from the Voris fellow that Peter linked in the Maddow thread.

People can't be trusted.

That Bob hasn't progressed to calling for a disenfranchisement of those with the wrong values and beliefs doesn't change the bedrock assumption that something must be done about the risk those people pose.

In the end the libertarian fantasy Bob disparaged is nothing more than the true knowledge that people are stupid, but that they are still far smarter about their own lives than any government could ever hope to be.

Professor, when you pointed out that guns are the big equalizer for women in home invasions Wright put the problem in terms of someone "stealing your stuff".

In the first place, contrary to what Wright says a large number of home invasions are perpetrated by multiple persons, not one. I don't know what the statistics are but a lot of home burglaries involve a team of people - recently in our own neighborhood.

Secondly, Wright trying to steer the argument towards someone "stealing your stuff" is sleazy, especially in the context that you set up about women defending themselves. At the point you have a woman alone in a home with a man breaking in I submit that far down the list of concerns is someone "stealing [their] stuff".

Every once in a while I get an insight into the mind of one of these jerks and I am amazed. Wright's dishonesty (intentional or not) in that segment, combined with all the eye rolling and laughing, makes him a real ass.

I actually would pay cash money to see Cedarford on boringheads. Or Crack. But Bob Wright has tiny little baby balls and would never do it in a million years.

A very liberal college professor who voted for Obama and holds every liberal position on things like abortion, feminism and gay rights is as close as he will get to a conservative. And she is constantly vilified by the commenter’s at that.

"People do not like to be treated like fools, or backward infants, or extras in some parade. There is a natural and inborn resistance to such tutelage, for the simple-enough reasons that young people want to be regarded as adults, and parents can't bear to be humiliated in front of their children. One of Francis Fukuyama's better observations, drawing on his study of Hegel and Nietzsche, was that history shows people just as prepared to fight for honor and recognition as they are for less abstract concepts like food or territory."

The subject was Egypt, but it applies to anyone.

Unfortunately Althouse's patient explanation that Beck is popular because he treats he audience with respect will fall on deaf ears.

If Bob Wright was a businessman instead of a commie symp he would try to get Glen Beck or Bill ORielly to appear on boringheads. To talk to someone like Rachel Maddow or Chris Tingyleg or one of the other minions of Satan that infest our airwaves.

But that would mean he would want to be a success. And that is not the goal here. He just wants to go spelunking in the echo chamber.

I think it's fairly obvious the Wright watches Glenn Beck via Jon Stuart parodies...that's cheating.I'm watching Beck as I type this and, frankly, his show tonight is interesting.He's digging a little deeper into the Muslim Brotherhood than regular media has time or interest in doing. Oh, how fun, he just managed to bring up the Tides Foundation. Alarm bells must be going off in Bob Wright's brain.

I noticed the "steal your stuff" part of it. It followed the notion that you've got a constitutional right to defend yourself from a "reasonable" home intrusion.

I suppose rapists aren't reasonable.

Althouse said that guns as an equalizer was a feminist issue. She's right about this. And Wright seeing it as a "steal your stuff" issue is egregious chauvinism. It may not have been purposeful but simply because he's not, and has never been, a girl.

So the way to live with yourself if you're in the media business is to deny a lectern to zanies like Beck and reserve it for sane voices-o'-reason like Amanda "Can't a few white boys sexually assault a black woman anymore without people getting all wound up about it" Marcotte? Gotcha.

It's a pity you never got back around to Piven. I would have liked to learn whether the people who've been giving her a forum have a moral responsibility to quit doing it.

Synova, yes I think in most places sawed off shotguns are illegal. They're also typically plugged so they can only carry 3 rounds. I know, 3 shotgun rounds is a lot of firepower, but how well are you going to handle yourself and your weapon under those circumstances? And how many attackers are you defending against?

For what it's worth, I don't own any firearms. I don't like having them in the house, they make me nervous ever since I had a little kid. And if I was choosing a home defense weapon a shotgun would be my choice because I am not confident in my proficiency with handguns while I have a lot of experience with shotguns.

With a handgun a smaller person can get themselves trained to the point of being passably proficient at defending themselves. They're easy to keep in a drawer or purse and a sober, calm person can use them for defense pretty well.

All of which is a discussion about the utility of firearms for self defense, which you can't have with someone that disses and deflects into 'one guy stealing your stuff'.

I auditioned for Bloggingheads, because they wanted to pit a "typical Althouse commenter" against a "typical Bloggingheads commenter". The person they put me with was interested in a lot of things that I didn't care about, and seemed to want to have some sort of tepid ideological exchange that I wasn't interested in having. It seemed to me that the Bloggingheads people's idea was to pair me with some wonky transnational smarty-pants who would, by contrast, show me to be a blubbering, angry, reactionary Cro-Magnon. Apparently they didn't know who they were dealing with. I didn't take the bait and they never contacted me again.

Bob Wright is usually very even tempered and reasonable, for a liberal. Here, he was totally off.

His multiple guns talk makes it seem like either he doesn't know that magazines are removable, or maybe he is against having them be removable--hard to say. In any case, the magazine is the least complex part of a firearm and can easily be made out of sheet metal.

Another think I noticed is that he kept insisting that he wasn't calling for government censorship. Okay, fine; that might have made sense if Althouse was arguing the other side of this. She wasn't. Althouse was arguing against the type of censorship that Wright was calling for. What is most odd is that Wright can't wrap his mind around the easiest concept: Ailes and Beck actually believe in what they are doing and they are not crazy.

I blame Sarah Palin for the protests in Egypt. Her use of social media (Facebook) to get around our MSM gatekeepers showed the people in Egypt how to get around the same thing in Egypt.

/via Insty:

The social media tools had given people something that they had lacked previously, an independent means of communication and propaganda. Hundreds of thousands of young Egyptians in a matter of minutes were seeing the demonstration videos being uploaded on youtube. For an apolitical generation that had never shown interest in such events the demonstration was unprecedented. More remarkable they were tremendously exaggerated. At a moment when no more than 500 demonstrators had started gathering in that early morning, an Egyptian opposition leader could confidently tweet that he was leading 100,000 in Tahrir Square. And it stuck.

... he kept insisting that he wasn't calling for government censorship. Okay, fine; that might have made sense if Althouse was arguing the other side of this. She wasn't. Althouse was arguing against the type of censorship that Wright was calling for.

Yes! I couldn't understand where his replies were coming from. Rage against Beck and Fox News, I guess.

Am I the only one who would like Bob Wright to STFU once in a while and let the other person finish a sentence? I get so tired of him just blaring on and on about his point, speaking over whoever is the other guest and not letting them finish a point. Maybe part of it is that I think he is an idiot most of the time but people are appearing there to discuss things and he does not let the discussion continue, not ever. I saw many times when you were in the process of responding to the point he was trying to make and he just kept talking and talking to the point that I just shut the whole thing off. I find him very narrow minded in not even trying to hear what the other person is really saying.

Interesting that the only home invasion Bob can talk about is one guy breaking in and that 10 bullets should be more than enough. Guess he can't envision more than one crook ganging up to invade a home. Might mention Charles Manson's crew and how many were they.

"Because some guy named Bob Wright gets to decide how you get to defend yourself."

Well, that's the problem, isn't it.

Too many people think that being right matters. It doesn't, really. It certainly doesn't justify letting the government decide which choices in home defense are the only allowed choices. There are problems associated with extended clips. Saying then that it's okay to outlaw those clips because a smart person wouldn't use them anyway is sort of like saying it's okay to outlaw anything that someone shouldn't do anyway... go without a headscarf in Cairo, eat fast food, whatever.

No doubt Wright heard someone explaining that shotguns are best, and they do have their good points, but they are far less *handy* than a pistol and Althouse's argument that a pistol is less intimidating and awkward for a woman to use is right on the money.

I think Althouse dragged Wright out of his comfort zone. He seemed extremely ill at ease when she started talking about groupie sex in bathrooms, bjs, and penis portraits. And who can blame him? These are difficult subjects on which to pontificate while talking with a woman. There was something crafty and pleassurable in the zest with which Althouse made her points about bathroom sex......You have to admire Wright's innocence in other areas as well. He thinks the Muslim Brotherhood is being "pragmatic" by offering to work with Baredi and others. Apparently only people like Glenn Beck are capable of devious or duplicitous behavior.....Point of order: Non-governmental groups got people with Communist pasts fired during the McCarthy era. This according to Wright was not a first amendment issue, and they were within their rights. Their behavior should be emulated by those wishing to eliminate Beck. It's only McCarthyism when applied to left wing speech.

What we need is some kind of WikiingHeads where any of the usual suspects can be bumped by a Palladian or The Crack Emcee without warning. That would be fun.

Bloggingheads worked for a while. It marked the moment when everyone knew that the mainstream small-print op-ed crowd was 24 hours behind.

But it was -- and no longer is -- a novelty act. With a few notable exceptions (plus Mr. Wright, who is usually better than in this episode) Bloggingheads' one great advantage over the mainstream was not the persuasiveness of its participants, but the freshness of their ideas.

Well, that didn't last long.

The liberals are hopelessly repetitive. Wright moonlights in print. Kaus writes for Newsweek. Althouse, the only other iconoclast, has no need of the thing.

Like so many of the comments here, I had trouble with the Beck segment. I don't feel that Ann responded to Wright clearly, though. He kept saying that it was a moral obligation on the part of Roger Ailes to stop showing Glen Beck, or he's a bad person. Why isn't the obvious answer, Maybe Roger Ailes' view of Glen Beck is not the same as yours? Don't know whether he agrees with everything Beck says, maybe not, but that doesn't mean he thinks he's dangerous.So because you're sure someone is dangerous, anyone who doesn't agree with you is immoral.